Chapter 201 CHAPTER 201
Chapter 201 CHAPTER 201
Elena looked at the three stunned faces before her and smiled, though there was no warmth in it. "From the look on your face, Your Majesty," she said, her eyes fixed on Ariel, "it seems you already know who I am."
Before Ariel could find her voice, Edwin stepped forward, his usual composure shattered by something that looked dangerously close to fury. "What are you doing in Ashwood?" His voice was sharp as broken glass. "How did you get past the guards? How were you allowed into the throne room?"
Elena's smile widened, becoming almost playful. "It seems that after Ashwood buried everything that happened in the past, they also forgot to warn the guards against letting me or anyone from the Eastern Kingdom near the Ashwood crown." She chuckled, the sound light and unnatural against the tension thickening the air. "Some secrets stay buried so long that people forget they were ever secrets at all."
Ariel turned toward Edwin, her mind racing to connect fragments she didn't know were related. "Who is she? What secret is she talking about?"
"She is an unwelcome guest." Edwin's jaw was tight, his hands clasped behind his back in a posture Ariel recognized, the one he used when he was holding himself together through sheer force of will. "You and Zack should return to your chambers. Let me deal with this."
Ariel looked from Edwin to Elena and back again. She saw it then, the history between them, something old and wounded and fiercely guarded. The tension in Edwin's shoulders matched the defiant lift of Elena's chin, two people who had spent years on opposite sides of a war that Ariel was only now discovering existed.
"No." The word came out quietly, but it carried the weight of her new authority. "I think I'll stay and hear what she has to say, Edwin."
She felt Zack's questioning glance through their bond, his concern a warm pressure against her thoughts. But she was already moving, taking his hand and leading him back to the thrones they had so recently abandoned. She settled into the carved seat with deliberate care, arranging her silver skirts with hands that only shook slightly.
"If I'm going to lead Ashwood," she said, meeting Edwin's eyes, "then I have to start from a place of truth. The whole truth." She paused, tasting the next words before she spoke them. "Even if it's bitter."
Elena's expression shifted, something almost like respect flickering across her features. "I heard you were different," she said softly. "Now I understand why."
She approached the throne with measured steps, each one deliberate, and when she reached the dais, she bowed with the grace of someone who had been raised to royalty. The gesture was correct, perfect, and somehow mocking in its precision.
Ariel ignored the cold knot forming in her stomach and turned to Edwin. "Do you want to stay or leave?"
He hesitated, his gaze locked on Elena with an intensity that spoke of old wounds and older grudges. Finally, he moved to stand beside the throne, his posture rigid, his silence louder than words.
"From the look of things," Ariel said, turning back to the woman who had disrupted everything, "you're not here to congratulate me on rising to the throne."
Elena straightened, and for a moment, something vulnerable showed in her eyes, a grief that hadn't faded with time. "You are mistaken, Your Majesty. I did come to congratulate you. I simply didn't want to cause drama, so I chose to arrive after everyone else had left." She glanced at Edwin, who remained silent but watchful, his glare unrelenting. "But for you to understand why there is such... hostility toward my presence, I should introduce myself properly."
She drew herself up, "I am Princess Elena Everest, soon to be Luna Queen of the Eastern Kingdom." A pause, heavy with meaning. "The woman you recognized when the doors opened was not me, but my twin sister, Alessia."
There was a silent pause heavy with what Ariel imagined was another secret about to be unraveled. She straightened in her seat, despite her racing heart.
"The last time I stepped foot in Ashwood was twenty-one years ago," Elena continued, her voice steady despite the emotion gathering in her eyes. "I came to collect my sister's dead body from this palace. More specifically, from her fiancé's bedroom, where she died."
Silence filled the throne room like water, cold and suffocating. Ariel heard her own heartbeat, too loud in her ears, felt Zack's hand find hers on the armrest and squeeze with desperate reassurance.
Somehow, Ariel already knew where this was going, but waited to hear it from her own mouth anyway.
Elena let the words settle, let them find their marks in the stunned faces before her. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper, but it carried to every corner of the ancient room.
"Alessia was engaged, soon to be mated, to Prince Lucien." She looked directly at Ariel, and there was no mockery in her gaze now, only a terrible, complicated compassion. "Your father."
There it was, the long kept Ashwood secret surrounding her father’s disappearance. The one thing everyone refused to say to her, now coming from the last person they ever expected Ariel to ever meet in her lifetime.
Ariel felt the world tilt.
The throne room, the crown, the weight of everything she had become in the past months, all of it spun around her like debris in a storm. Her father's face rose in her memory, the portrait she had found, the woman beside him with the warm brown eyes and the smile that held secrets.
Her hands began to shake in earnest now, and she gripped the carved arms of the throne to hide it. The silver gown felt suddenly too tight, the crown too heavy, the air too thin to breathe. She felt Zack's alarm through their bond, his voice saying her name from somewhere very far away, but she couldn't respond, couldn't move, could only stare at the woman who had carried her sister's body from this palace.
The silence stretched between them, fragile and sharp, filled with the ghosts of a past that Ariel had never known existed, and now could never un-know.